December 31, 2006

No classy dinner-party invites in a long time for us plain-vanilla heterosexuals. That vacant seat at the dining room tables of Manhattan's movers and shakers has been going to the lesbians and transies. Of course, I understand. We heteroes are boring, always have been. Our zone of conversation is binary: love found and love lost. Lesbians and transies have had such a broader range of experience to share with their gawking hosts and the host's gawking guests.

December 30, 2006

Use it or lose it, right. Both Elizabeth Edwards and Cindy Sheehan have used their grief over the death of their sons as a killer political app. You can't blame them. Most of us are deers in the headlight when faced with a mother's grief.

December 29, 2006

I met my first industrious drone (ID) in college. Initially, I had no idea what it was. It never missed class, took verbatim notes, always laughed at the prof's jokes, went to bed at midnight, and gave up its cafeteria dinner one day a year to feed the poor. By mid first-semester senior year, it was engaged to be married, which was the industrious drone path then. On Thanksgiving vacation my freshman year in my play-all-the-angles city of Jersey City I was able to identify it as a linear entity which followed the rules and expected A to yield B, and in time C. Novelist Saul Bellow identified the antithesis of the ID in his book "The Adventures of Augie March." Augie March always had a scheme or knew he could come up with one.

Spankings, handcuffs and trying to handle sexual relationships with six men got the google juice going for Jessica Culture's blog "Washingtonienne." So much so, that the content landed her in a $20-million lawsuit. According to CNN.COM, one of the men Culture discussed on her blog, which she classifies as a personal diary, has filed a lawsuit claiming violation of privacy and offensive material. All the Internet world, from bloggers to legal experts, are watching this one.

December 27, 2006

Let's eliminate the nonprofit. Every institution in America, where capitalism is the unofficial religion, should be forced to produce a profit, along with doing its good deeds. And what's with the special treatment in the tax code?

For six eye-opening months I have inflicted upon myself volunteer activities in various nonprofits. I would like to assume this was journalistic research. But I know better. I, yes, was trying to make a difference.

On his blog NakedConversations.com, Shel Israel is trial-running ideas for his next book "Global Neighborhoods." It's all so exciting about how cheap, user-friendly digital communications are giving Everyman access to new friends, new ways of making a living, new influence and, yeah, even power. So, I leave this preview of "Global Neighborhoods," like Marco Polo to exclaim about the wonders of this new world to my neighbors in Bella Vista Complex, New Haven, Connecticut aka Geezerville. Mistake. This branch of Geezerville is old media - two TVs in 700-square-feet of space and radios - and that's that.

Are we born with just so much talent, just like we fems are born with just so many eggs? That thought is floating around, even in America, the nation of no limitations. For example, in the new book "Old Masters and Young Geniuses," that question is raised about artists like F. Scott Fitzgerald. When he was 29 he published "The Great Gatsby." And that was that in the talent territory. It's conjectured he had no more talent in him. If Sylvia Plath, who wrote amazing poems like "Daddy" before she was 30, had lived: Would her later work be derivative?

America has lost a decent man - Gerald Ford. As a political leader, the jury is out if he played his cards shrewdly enough and enough in the interest of protecting his legacy. But as a husband, he was a prince of decency. He stuck by his mate Betty Ford during her struggle with addiction in ways that perhaps presidential candidate Michael S. Dukakis couldn't or wouldn't.

December 26, 2006

It could be a career-killer for a ghostwriter of books like myself to say that over the holiday weekend she packed up 14 cartons (large) of books and donated them (w/o a tax deduction) to a cause wanting books. But this act, I am convinced, will make me a much better ghostwriter and writer in general. Those particular books made me stupid.